SC98 - Globus Toolkit unveiled on international computational grid

Numerous technical demonstrations at the SC98 showcase the capabilities of this software system, called the Globus Toolkit. These demonstrations will involve both Globus developers and participants in the Globus Ubiquitous Supercomputing Testbed Organization (GUSTO), an informal international consortium of grid researchers. In addition, many conference participants will learn details of Globus technologies during a full-day tutorial.

"As a result of a tremendous amount of work by many people, we are now able to distribute the Globus technology that we first demonstrated in prototype form at this conference a year ago," said Ian Foster of Argonne and the University of Chicago, who co-leads the Globus project with Carl Kesselman of ISI. "We're looking forward to working with groups across the U.S. and around the world to explore the new computing paradigms that are enabled by a usable grid."

Foster and Kesselman believe that future computational grids will place the most advanced supercomputers, data archives, virtual-reality displays, and scientific instruments at the fingertips of the nation's scientists and engineers--regardless of where tools or people are located--and hence enable new problem solving techniques, such as distributed supercomputing, remote visualization, and tele-immersion.

"What's important about this occasion is that we are not only releasing software, we're also providing major demonstrations of what the software can do," said Kesselman. "Numerous tool developers, application developers, and scientists are already working with Globus and are finding it useful."

One of the Globus-based applications to be demonstrated on the show floor in Orlando will feature real-time display of data from the Advanced Photon Source near Chicago, the world's most brilliant X-ray Source. Conference participants will be able to view and discuss images of millimeter-sized micromachines, just minutes after data is collected in Chicago. Another Globus-based application will provide rapid tomographic computation and 3-D visualization of electron microscope data acquired from the world's most powerful electron microscope in Osaka, Japan. The parallel tomography code derives from software developed by the National Biomedical Computing Center at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the leading-edge site of the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) that in-part sponsors the Globus project. Other demonstrations will show how Globus technologies can be used to couple supercomputers across the U.S. to achieve an order-of-magnitude improvement in simulation capabilities used to support training, and to enable collaborative design of complex engineering systems.

Globus provides the technical underpinning for the National Technology Grid being pioneered by the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance), and serves as a cornerstone of the metacomputing environment being created by NPACI. The Alliance, anchored by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, helped develop essential software and incorporated its SGI Cray Origin2000 and Hp Convex Exemplar supercomputers into the GUSTO grid. The Alliance and NPACI are the two programs of the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) initiative, funded a year ago by the National Science Foundation. Globus is at the center of major collaborative Grid initiatives involving the Alliance and NPACI--such as the NASA Information Power Grid (IPG) program. Globus is also an important component of the Department of Energy's DOE2000 program and DARPA's Quorum middleware program.

Globus technologies are also being applied in an international context. During SC98, multinational groups from the U.S., Canada, Japan, Singapore, Germany, Australia, and elsewhere will use Globus in demonstrations of trans-oceanic collaboration, in areas ranging from astrophysics to electron microscopy and anthropology. These activities are being performed in the context of the iGrid, an international networking effort centered around the STAR-TAP networking access point based in Chicago.

Another innovative technology being demonstrated at the conference by the Globus project and its partners is the "grid passport," credit card-sized smartcards containing personalized public key credentials. Conference participants will be able to use grid passports to access computers anywhere in the GUSTO network. Technology provided by Litronic Inc.'s CryptOS SDK^TM cryptographic toolkit ensures that user private keys are never exposed on a network.

Other GUSTO participants include the Aerospace Corporation, Boston University, the California Institute of Technology, the Paralleldatorcentrum at Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan in Sweden, Indiana University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NASA Ames Research Center, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Gravitationsphysik in Germany, the Maui High Performance Computing Center, Monash University in Australia, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Osaka University in Japan, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, SDSC, the Texas Center for Computational and Information Sciences at the University of Houston, the University of Chicago, and the Condor Project at the University of Wisconsin.

Globus research and development is supported by DARPA, DOE, NASA, and NSF.